There have been a couple times in the last week where I have been involved in discussions where someone assigns Buddhism a supreme being. While they do have the venerated Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama ), he is not a creator god. There is, in fact, no creator god in Buddhism.
Buddhism does acknowledges the existence of supernatural beings called devas. However the life of a deva is only temporary, they like the humans are still stuck in samsara (the continual cycle of death and rebirth). They are still subject to the sufferings of samsara and the effects of Karma. The deva are no closer to nirvana then humans and in fact being born a deva offers too many pleasures and distractions to inspire a serious motivation for meditation and selflessness. So it is believed that the human realm is best for realizing full enlightenment.
This lack of a supreme being also causes what to me is one of the attractions of Buddhism. The removal of the supreme creator turns the theology/philosophy into a logical process. The Buddha analyzed the problem of suffering, diagnosed its root cause and prescribed a method to dispel suffering. There were no visitations, no miracles, no reliance in belief of the unseen or emotion. Buddhist philosophy doesn’t ask you to imagine that which cannot be seen, or to understand the difference between God touching the soul and human emotion. It is logically understandable by the mind alone and, thus most importantly, replicable.
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